Internet-based screensharing sessions are popular ways to collaborate, and are used to conduct presentations for various purposes such as business meetings, product sales pitches, symposiums, and the like. These sessions have the advantage of allowing groups of people to attend a presentation without having to be physically in the same room.
However, screensharing sessions are often conducted from a presenter's personal or private business computer, and therefore involve sharing the contents of the display of the presenter's computer with the participants of the screensharing session. This raises various privacy and security concerns, including the possibility that notifications and instant messages received by the presenter may “pop up” on the presenter's display during a screen sharing session, and thus be inadvertently shared with the participants of the screensharing session.
Instant messaging systems allow users to communicate asymmetrically by sending text messages back and forth between instant messaging applications on user computers using various appropriate protocols such as Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Rendezvous Protocol (RVP), etc. Typically, when a user is logged into an instant messaging service via an instant messaging application, some subset of other users of the service (often those on a user's “friend list”) can send messages to the user without the user's prior approval.
For the user's convenience, the instant messaging application may move a messaging window containing the newly received message to the front of the user's display so that the user does not miss the message. Alternatively or in addition, an operating system on the user's computer may cause an alert of some sort to be displayed to the user. For example, the alert may include a small window in a corner of the display which contains at least a preview of the received instant message for several seconds before disappearing in order to alert the user to the received message. The operating system may also facilitate display of other types of notifications as a small window in a corner of the display. For example, the operating system may notify the user that an application requires an update, that a security application has discovered a vulnerability, that a calendar appointment is upcoming, that a new email has been received, or the like.
The contents of instant messages, emails, calendar appointments, and the like may be sensitive. Sharing this sensitive information could be detrimental to business, could reveal legally protected information, or otherwise be very embarrassing for the presenter. It may therefore be desirable to implement systems and methods for preventing such notifications and messages to display on a user's computer screen while that user is presenting in a screensharing session.